ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

Morton’s poetry

Tim Morton writes beautifully. His “Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones,” published in the most recent issue of Continent, is a beautiful illustration of this. I could say he writes poetically, but that would be suggesting that his writing is not itself poetry, but only looks and feels like poetry — which would mean succumbing to a distinction between the essence of Morton’s writing and its appearance, and to a rift between the two, that I’m not prepared to commit to (though I think that Morton is).

Morton distinguishes in his article between the poetry, aesthetics, or “performance art” of Hakim Bey’s writing on “temporary autonomous zone,” and its politics. The first he calls “ambiguous,” and, if my reading of the article is correct, this ambiguity allows Bey’s notion of an “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” to escape the objection that it is a form of reductionism or holism (undermining or overmining, in OOO terms), or of onto-theology (to use a more Continental-philosophical form of dismissal).

But if it’s this distinction between the aesthetic and the political (/philosophical/ontological) that saves Bey from becoming poor philosophy (or ontology, or politics), I fear that this distinction may also be the one that would ultimately save Morton, or OOO, or anyone else from a similar fate. If the essence of a philosopher’s argument — the distilled, pure logic of his or her propositions — can be separated from the images, metaphors, and other guises in which those arguments come clothed, then we have already accepted part of that logic itself. The separation is a proposition, and it’s one whose acceptance carries costs.

For instance, if beauty is separable from form, if it is a matter of appearance-to-another-entity that is only contingently related to the properties of the object in question — if beauty is, in other words, on the side of appearance and not of essence (or existence; Morton uses both of these terms to contrast with appearance) — then it seems to me that beauty would not be able to truly take hold of an object. Its action would only be superficial. But is this how we respond to beauty?

Process-relational philosophies see the aesthetic as just as essential to a thing as the ontological, philosophical, or political. This means that (for us) the poetry of Morton’s article — say, the image of a “gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities” — can hardly be separated from the prose, which in this case is the list of claims being made: about objects withdrawing from access, about a rift between the essence of an object and its “mere appearance,” about the “coral reef [not] going anywhere” and that “once you have discovered it, you can’t un-discover it,” about “entities in the reef” constituting “all there is,” and about “some objects” maintaining themselves “through rigidity and brittleness” while others do not. The reef isn’t merely an example or an image for the philosophical point; it is the way the point is able to be made. Without coral reefs and polypses, maggots and cheeses, liars, Tibetan Autonomous Regions, police states and circuses (all of which make appearances in Morton’s article), our capacity to think things becomes impoverished.

There is, in a process-relational perspective, no “rift” between essence and appearance, but rather something more like a tension, a movement or a slippage, and it is this movement that defines the thing itself. A process-relationist would agree with Morton (wholeheartedly) that there is no absolute space or time in which a thing has its being; rather a thing “spaces” and “times.” (I’m glad to see that Tim isn’t so shy of verbs anymore.) And that a thing exudes or “emits” its own “zone.” It is this temporality and this zoneness that renders any object “temporarily autonomous.”

But a process-relationist sees relationality, which is to say movement between, the reaching out, drawing away from, and negotiation of a spacedness and a rhythm in mutuality, as essential to the timing and the spacing or zoning. A thing doesn’t simply emit a zone, irrespective of whatever else is in its vicinity; it zones (or spaces) relationally. Its time is a time of movement-with. A thing does not merely withdraw from all access, away to some hidden cave of its own solitude. It withdraws in the same movement as it draws forward, elsewhere. It is on the move, ever withdrawing from capture by another (perhaps, and even by itself too), but this means ever moving toward another other, not (again) toward its own lonesome selfhood. It is relational movement of one kind or another, and it is its particular kind of movement, with its peculiarities, idiosyncracies, internal complexities and contradictions, that defines it.

One can ask what this thing brings with it in its movement, and whether that “bringing with” might not be the body, the carapace, or indeed the essence of the object. But this is not much different from the question the objectologist has to deal with when asked which is the “real” object: the coral reef, the community of polyps making up its heads, each head itself, or something else? The movement of the coral reef is different from the movement of the polyps; the one takes account of different things than the other, and brings different things with it (or tries to) in this taking account and responding to things.

And in this taking account is the aesthetic, which is the lure and the drive, the dynamic tension, the rift if you will, that keeps the entity generating itself, and changing itself (while being changed by others) in and through its generations. The aesthetic is not secondary, derivative, and separate from the thing itself, a thing that can somehow withdraw to an inaccessibly safe region beyond art, beauty, appearance and perception. Without the aesthetic, the image, the metaphor, the clothing, there is no object because there is no dynamic entanglement with other things, and it is this entanglement, this relational tension, that provides the occasion for the becoming of the entity as it arises, grows, moves, changes, and exhausts itself.

(Note that I use the terms “entity” and “thing” because I don’t want to slide back into the debate over whether these should be called “objects” or, say, “subjects.” Morton acknowledges that OOO-ists’ use of the term “object” for all entities is “somewhat provocative,” which suggests to me that this is part of their objectological aesthetic. It is, I think, strategic, a matter of appearance, rather than essential to the project of OOO, a realist project that process-relational philosophies, for the most part, share.)

Then there are the ends of objects. “When the rift between appearance and essence collapses,” Morton writes, “that is called destruction, ending, death. […] Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends.” In process-relational (and, specifically, Whiteheadian) terms, when the prehensive subject-superject collapses into pure objectivity without remainder, when there is no more movement save for what is taken from a thing by another thing, the thing is over. But a process-relationist would exercise extra caution to remind readers that there is no essence, no “I,” that continues across and behind all appearances until one day it collapses into mere appearance. The essence itself is never entirely fixed; it is a manner of changing, moving, becoming.

How, then, would a process-relationist define beauty and poetry? Neither is separate from the essence of a thing, because they are inherent to the process by which it essences, by which it posits itself in the coming to know of others. Morton’s rift between essence and appearance (a rift that he acknowledges is within an object) is, for a process-relationist, less like a chasm than a driving tension. It is a kind of constitutive gap between the receding (virtual) possibilities of the past and the (equally virtual) lure of the future, between the becoming-object of a thing falling away from actuality and its becoming-subject in and through actualization, a gap between what the object (thinks/feels it) is and what it (thinks/feels it) is not. (The “thinking/feeling” is important here, if we use the words rather loosely, since it is what the object, any object, is doing as it moves.)

Movement across this gap is aesthetic and political; it is a movement of feeling that is also a movement intended to realize something in relation to the world around it. It is an always moving gap which the thing is aiming (perhaps) to close but never does. And when that gap does finally close, pfffft, no more thing. Just like that. (Which is just as Morton says.)

The Buddha called it enlightenment (sort of).

But then he, or his interpreters, also allowed for a difference between essence and appearance. This is what’s known as the doctrine of Two Truths, the Conventional (or Relative) and the Ultimate, the first being that there really is such a thing as this, and as that, and the second being that there really isn’t. We might think of the first as the truth of appearance, and the second as the truth of essence. But the second holds that thingshaveno essence — that the only essence is the conditioned arising of all things. There’s a much longer discussion here, which I’ll avoid right now, but the point is that essentialism and relativism (or constructivism) are not opposed once we realize the processuality of all things. Madhyamika Buddhists, and others after them, realized this long ago.

There is, or ought to be, room in philosophy today for a school of thought that holds that there is a rift between the conventional (appearance) and the ultimate (essence), and for another that holds that the two are reconciled, for the moment in and through each moment (and movement), in practice. (Of course every momentary reconciliation is elusive, which is why we keep moving.) The first of these is an object-oriented philosophy that directs its gaze to the objects and their appearances. The second is a process-relational philosophy that directs its gaze to the living, the becoming, the praxis by which all subjects deal with the appearances of other subjects (and of themselves). And in practice neither the objectologists nor the processualists ignore what the others make central in their analyses. They are simply slicing into the wood at a different angle, one from the side and the other from the top. Or one taking snapshots of the river and the other scanning all around from their own swimming bodies.

In any case, the making of sufficient space for both schools (among others) is a matter of good spacing and good timing — good zoning.

Thanks to Tim for provoking these thoughts. I would encourage readers to read the article, which is very good.

[Afterword: I know I’m generalizing about “us” process-relationists as I probably should not, both because not all of those whom I’m generalizing about use the term itself, and because not all of those who do use the term would necessarily agree with all I have to say. But, hey, they can say that themselves.]

19 Responses

not very comfortable extending the experience of aesthetics beyond the roughly bio-logical (not to privileged such but rather to let the alien be truly alien) but wonder if we might all be comfortable talking instead in terms of something akin to performativity, which would highlight the doing aspect but without any necessary platonic holdovers of the Beautiful or some related vast Harmony/Communion?

Almost everything you said is also true of my/a pragmatic view; I do like to see the resonance across so many traditions. When I was taking classes in pragmatism as a graduate student, our professor would often use Buddhists terms to describe pragmatism, as it was appropriate. So, don’t apologize for generalizing too much….

I’m not sure where you’re getting the Platonism from. It’s processional realism. Understanding aesthetic in its Kantian (first critique) sense, it roughly means the elements and order of experience. But if human experience is only part of a wider natural phenomenon of transaction, something that all of nature does, then human aesthetic experience is notable for the human contribution but not reducible to it.

JH, no necessary reason I can see to understand all interactions as aesthetics, usually this kind of move is made to give human aesthetics some powers of access/understanding which reaches beyond (transcends) the all too critterly manipulations that Heidegger denounced as being merely anthropological and sent him waxing Romantic in his later works on poetic dwelling.

dmf – As Jason has suggested, I intend no privileging of ‘human access’ in my understanding of aesthetics. I’m following Whitehead and Peirce, among others, in taking ‘feeling’ and therefore ‘aesthetics’ (as a kind of synthesis of feeling) to be at the basis of all experience, whether human, microbial, or any other kind.

I’m not sure what you mean by being uncomfortable with “extending the experience of aesthetics beyond the roughly bio-logical” – this sounds like a form of biocentrism to me (which is better than anthropocentrism, but still insufficient, from a process-relational perspective). And whatever “this kind of move” is “usually” intended to do is irrelevant to judging what it does here.

hi Adrian not sure why seeing aspects of biological ways of being as different enough to make a difference (but not necessarily better than but also not of a kind/norm) is “biocentrism”, nor why process thinking needs to extend feeling to all matter of things as opposed to just doings, which is why I spoke in terms of “interactions” my reply to JH instead of “transactions”.
Also was reflecting on where tmorton might be going with poetry as a medium/message/means, and how this might be akin to projecting semiotics onto/into the rest of existence.
We may have hit a “dead-end” here as tsparrow recent blogged on, which is fine all part of the sorting out/clarifying process, as I have said elsewhere let a thousand flowers bloom.

1) From a process-philosophical point of view, which sees everything as processual and relational, and therefore as a matter of feeling (& aesthetics), any view that restricts the latter only to a certain category of entity would be ontologically restrictive: ‘anthropocentric’ if it restricts it to humans, ‘biocentric’ if it restricts it to biological organisms, etc. This P-R critique of such ‘centrisms’ is shared with OOO, but not with many other philosophies/ontologies. However, P-R philosophy *does* distinguish all manner of ‘differences that make differences,’ including between different kinds of entities such as those traditionally called ‘organisms’ and other things called, e.g., ‘atoms,’ ‘electrons,’ and so on, as well as (on the other side) specific kinds of organisms, like humans, tortoises, water lilies, and amoebas. There are worlds of difference between all of these. So if all you are saying is that ‘aesthetics’ is restricted to the biological, but that non-biological things also ‘act’ or ‘interact’ or do something else, then we still basically agree except that we are defining ‘aesthetics’ differently – you more restrictively, I more broadly.

2) P-R thinking *does* extend ‘feeling’ to all manner of ‘doings.’ It sees anything that’s ontologically real, any ‘actual occasion’ or ‘event of experience,’ as a ‘doing.’ So when I say ‘thing’ (at least in the above post) that’s what I mean. (So I don’t think we disagree here either.) That said, there are other kinds of ‘things’ (such as mental concepts, or what Whitehead calls ‘propositions’) that are a different kind of entity – not an actual entity, but a hybrid entity that arises between the world of actuality (those ‘doings’, or actual entities) and that of virtuality or potentiality. But discussing them here would take us too far afield.

So I hope it’s not a dead end; at least I don’t think so (though I’m not entirely clear about your views, so it’s hard for me to say).

AJI I think that we are all on a spectrum here in that we all see things as accomplishments/doings and see that these exertions interact with the exertions of other things, but you lose me when you seem to be talking about inanimate objects as if they were acting like animate objects, when I’m rock climbing the wall (in all it complexity/variation) does what it does or I couldn’t relate to it in the ways in which I do, some of its aspects become useful to my task as affordances some offer resistances and more so than not as a totality it exceeds my literally superficial grasp, but poetry/phenomenology aside it does not come to meet me or withdraw away from me, and what I do in one very local area of its wholeness has no real effect on the rest of its being. It is not thinking or feeling anything towards me, and its ‘oblivious’ yet substantial/impactful nature is part of what makes it both a lure and possible uncanny for me, but the rock does not find itself allured by me nor stuck by an experience of the uncanny in relation to me, I’m not even a figment of its imagination or a dream it is having,
at least as I understand the relationship.

dmf – I’m not sure where I’ve spoken of “inanimate” objects. (The word “object” is Tim’s and OOO’s term, which I’m occasionally using in order to make a translation/link to a process-relational perspective. I do believe that Tim argues that objects, including pencils for instance, do the kinds of things you’re saying that rock walls don’t do; but I don’t want to speak for him, and I also don’t know if he’d agree that those things are quite “inanimate.” On that topic, see here: http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/12/29/on-anthropomorphism-making-humans-pencils-souls/

Actually, I think that post on pencils answers your question about the rock wall. The point is that the “rock wall” is something *you* perceive. Neither you nor I know if it is an actually existent subject/agent acting in the universe. (I rather doubt it.) A “classic” Whiteheadian understanding would be that a rock wall is an aggregate. There is prehension going on in a piece of rock, but it is likely occurring at the molecular, atomic, subatomic, etc. levels (there’s a lot of activity going on there!), and probably not at the level that you have reified into your perception of “the rock” or “the rock wall.”

If you like, we can consider the rock wall to be an “appearance” (for me or you), and the “essence” of it to be inaccessible to either of us. (That would be putting things in Tim’s OOO terms.) But I don’t even assume that the rock wall (as a rock wall) *has* an essence. What I do assume is that there is *something* going on (happening, doing/being done, prehending/being prehended) that is making up the thing that I happen to experience as a rock wall.

no let’s avoid appearances and essences and stick with something (many things) going on, I’m all for dropping the old hidden depth (sign bearing angels of via media) move to talking about surfaces/edges. I took this
“A thing does not merely withdraw from all access, away to some hidden cave of its own solitude. It withdraws in the same movement as it draws forward, elsewhere. It is on the move, ever withdrawing from capture by another (perhaps, and even by itself too), but this means ever moving toward another other, not (again) toward its own lonesome selfhood. It is relational movement of one kind or another, and it is its particular kind of movement, with its peculiarities, idiosyncracies, internal complexities and contradictions, that defines it.”
as OOObject talk , whereas for me the fact that non-bio things exceed my grasp does not mean that they are withdrawing from me (I think when Levi adopts this Heideggerian term it covers over his own sense of things which I believe is more in line with what I’m saying here), nor are they purposeful in their affects on, relations to, other things, maybe you meant something closer to organism by “thing” in that section?

Yes, “closer to organism” works for me. In this sense, a human is a kind of mega-organism that sometimes acts in a highly coordinated manner (intermittently featuring what we call consciousness), but that includes within it all manner of other organisms, micro-organisms, micro-communities, and so on. I tend to assume an organismic universe (which Whitehead did as well), as opposed to a universe filled with buildings and blocks and books and machines and other things humans have made, which is a historical aberration, a highly unusual state of affairs. (Not that it’s bad – it’s an evolutionary achievement, and therefore not really an aberration at all. But it should not be made a new norm.)

One of the dangers of OOO’s object language (which I’ve written about on this blog before) is that, with all its references (and ‘Latour litanies’) to hammers and pencils and other manufactured (human-made) products, it might encourage the assumption that the standard for thinking about values needs to be shifted to include the autonomy of manufactured products – that it’s those objects that need liberation from the oppression of a worldview that doesn’t grant them their autonomy. This is just pushing biocentrism (i.e. a biological individualist ethic) beyond the ‘bios’ to a new kind of radical individualism. It’s a kind of libertarianism without the anarchist appreciation for relational networks and cooperation.

I understand the philosophical point that a hammer can ‘withdraw’ from me when it breaks down, but I don’t think it’s the hammer that’s actively withdrawing, since ‘hammer’ is both an idea and an object that humans have created; the only essence a hammer has is in its reference to human uses. Rather, it’s things that make up the hammer – wood, metal, etc., which go on to oxidize, rot, flake off, crystallize, and whatever else. Life goes on even in the wood and metal of a hammer. But the hammer *as hammer* is not itself alive except insofar as it’s a medium for new relational networks that themselves become alive. A city of hammer-wielding chimpanzees is alive in ways that are analogous, but different, from a city of microchip-controlled borgs, or a city of carpenter ants. The hammer makes possible new relational connections that open up new capacities for experience. But the locus of the experience is not in the hammer per se, it’s *with* and *through* the hammer, but always involving something more than a hammer. At least until hammers become self-organizing, autonomous agents. So far they are not.

So, again, I don’t see any great difference with the views you’re expressing.

First, now that my article is accepted, I can send you a primer in exactly what I’m talking about that synthesizes much of the work of my predecessors. Let me know if you’re interested.

“Aesthetic” in Deweyan pragmatism means “order and structure” such that it gives rise to a quality. On the non-human side, this is potentiality for an event of quality that emerges through natural transaction. Human transaction is just one such case in which the human-aesthetic qualities emerge as actualities. (I really do mean “potentiality” and not “possibility, btw.) This use of aesthetic is similar to Kant’s, but with many exceptions including realism that I can go into upon request. Its no small task to translate it out of the local jargon, but I will if you ask. My article covers this in great detail.

All things interact or transact, or at least all things that can be spoken of or thought and we can safely ignore the rest. Interaction is transaction; they should be viewed as synonymous, because there cannot be a purely one-way relation except possible for time, and even that is not certain. However, the semiotics of the interaction are not symmetric; your human experience of the wall is not the same as the wall’s experience of you. We are capable of a meaningful transaction with the wall that is one-sided. I would put it this way rather than speak of apparences of essences. When I hear of “alien phenomenology,” I abduce that the term refers to this phenonemon. We talk in this way, btw, to produce a realist phenomenology that is not a correlationism or correspondence. All of my personal work is in this.

As Adrian indicates, in this tradition, “experience” means the interaction of things in nature. Only in certain non-necessary contexts does experience become human experience. And in that case, it is first bodily and not conscious. Human experience is an event, not a constant, especially human conscious or mindful (linguistic) experience.

As for Morton and semiotics, I see no problem with understanding existence in terms in semiotics, i.e., in understanding existence in terms of its relations. That’s what Peirceans do, and Whiteheadians in a different way. Perhaps you’re conflating semantics and semiotics?

[…] the more philosophically minded, there’s a rich (but dense!) post about aesthetics, poetry, politics, ontology and death written by Adrian J. Ivakhiv, a professor of environmental studies, in response to a recent article […]

JH, congrats on your publication, michaelarchivefire and I would be interested in reading it (we left some such notes over @his place but this all gets a bit hard to track), if you could send him a copy that would be great. I get what Peirce and Whitehead were up to I just find it to be a kind of projection without owning and prefer Shaviro’s sense of being affected in ways that may come to being expressed as metaphors, keeps the trail of the human serpent in mind, noting after Wittgenstein differences that make a difference.
To my mind Dewey et al underestimated how profoundly different human imagination is, how thrown we are.
Live the differences.

Apologies, as my “follow up comments” function has never worked for some reason–I missed your reply.

Actually, I absolutely agree with you on Dewey and imagination. I am a harsh critic of Dewey, which has made it very difficult to publish since the major pragmatist journals (their reviewers) as still “figure-thinking” and set the bar much higher for criticisms. I construct a Deweyan theory of imagination from a number of his own texts and scholarly additions. I do so because Deweyans constantly proclaim the power of human imagination without telling us what it is. It is maddening how much is set upon its transformative power with almost no discussion of what it is (structurally, not behaviorally). I believe that only Mark Johnson has put out anything related to the topic in decades.

The paper’s title is telling, “Limited Horizons: The Habitual Basis of the Imagination.” Let me know where I can send it.

JH, no worries I’m so tech-ignorant I don’t even have follow-comments function.
I don’t have a public email to post here(for a variety of work and personal reasons) but if you send it to michael/af @ his ambientdisorder@gmail.com I’m sure that he will both read it and pass it along. thanks and sorry that you have to deal with all of the incrowd politics of the academy.